


Even protons decay

by Slant



Series: The legion of face-punching [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Existentialism, Other, Romance, Superheros
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-27
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-16 17:33:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5834476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slant/pseuds/Slant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Protip: don't ask your friends what there genitals are. It is super-rude and it is possible that they will be less focused on the anguish of leaving a brief life in an Absurd world than The Vacuous Gesture is, and may pay attention to you being an awful person.</p>
        </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

C-T  
Thanks for sending me that link to the article on hairstyles.  
It was astonishingly banal.  
This is me, being astonished.  
By how banal that thing was.  
Ugh.

It was nearly 1,000 words, in a chatty upbeat style; it acknowledged, repeatedly, its own supreme unimportance. The author invited the reader to think about how pointless not only the subject but also the process of the article was.  
I think we all felt just a little bit more terrified and alone for having read it.  
Thanks again,  
TVG


	2. Chapter 2

"Oh come on Cee-Tee , it's not like I assign meaning to nudity taboos, or that its anything you haven't seen before."  
"Two: that thing on dino-island where we all ended up in skimpy loincloths totally doesn't count. Staring wasn't task-relevant, plus I had a Pachycephalosaurus to punch. It had a two hundred mil skull plate. It was _amazing_."  
"One: in the context of date night, nudity has clear uses to signal intimacy, even if you refuse to accept a social convention of sexulised nudity, because it is clearly ridiculous. Context is important."  
"Have you been listening to Diversity?" said the Vacuous Gesture's in a mock-suspicious tone.  
"So what are these?" He said, gesturing towards The Vacuous Gesture's genitals.  
"Genitals," replied The Vacuous Gesture. "Alternatively one could perceive them as a meaningless but thermodynamically unlikely arrangement of matter."  
There was probably a trick to talking to The Vacuous Gesture, Cranial Trauma reflected, some approach on your part that got responses that, when examined from a particular angle, were if not meaningful, and least contained comprehensible ideas. For a start, he knew jem well enough to know that this wasn't bring-evasive-because -jee was uncomfortable. Jee wasn't uncomfortable with _anything_. This was going wildly of topic because jee hadn't realised that there was any other way to interpret a question except as an inquiry as to the nature of meaning.  
"So uh, like maybe not now, but if at some future point in our relationship it became appropriate, is there some way to touch them that makes you feel good?"  
"Oh!" Said The Vacuous Gesture, "I perceive your meaning*. Experience suggests that there is no obvious approach that in anyway distracts from my brief, meaningless existence, although there are several repetitive approaches that remind me more starkly of the futility of so-called Eternal Recurrence."  
"So-called?" said Cranial Trauma weakly; he was not really well suited for meta-cognition, although he had defeated mecha-Wittgenstein** in rap battle***.  
"It is an grotesquely hopeful formulation made possible only by ignoring basic thermodynamics."  
"So say I was..." he frowned briefly, concentrating, "assigning value to bringing you sexual satisfaction; how would you feel about me experimenting with ways of..." another pause to work out suitable language, "stimulating the external parts of your sex organs?"  
"That sounds like the behaviour of someone trying to distract me from the anguish of self- knowledge in an Absurd world," jee said, "which is very sweet of you, I guess I'll say if I'm ever in the mood. It seems extraordinarily unlikely."  
Cranial Trauma smiled. He had a dizzying moment when he thought that _he_ might be the person with talking-to-The Vacuous Gesture expertise. Sex might be fun, but intimacy was probably more important.  
"Those are some pretty subtle flavours of existential dread you've described. Do you want to tell me about them ?"  
And then he spent the evening smiling and nodding and asking interested questions and remembering and going back to things they discussed earlier, while The Vacuous Gesture sung all the flavours of the void.

* No one who had been around Diversity for as long as they had would say "I see what you mean".  
**Mecha-Wittgenstein had made a mistake concerning the fundamental nature of machine code.  
*** Editors note: Technically it was more _níðvísur_ ; or Norse insult-verse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Protip: don't ask your friends what there genitals are. It is super-rude and it is possible that they will be less focused on the anguish of leaving a brief life in an Absurd world than The Vacuous Gesture is, and may pay attention to you being an awful person.


End file.
